Friday, July 27, 2012

A recent near miss with some alleged ‘cornflour’ has prompted me to put
together a little list of handy vocabulary and various guiding tidbits to help
improve your chances of find what you need for baking in your local Japanese
supermarket.

Cornflourgate occurred when the package of yellow powder "コーンフラワー / corn
flour" on the right in the photo was purchased on my behalf at Nissin
supermarket, when I had intended to ask for the silky white powder labelled
"コーンスターチ / corn starch" on the left. This was a US/UK cultural misunderstanding
rather than a Japanese language issue, as the white,
sauce-thickening/meringue-softening powder commonly referred to in the UK as
“cornflour” is called corn starch in the US, and in Japan the American term is
used. Put the fine yellow American 'corn flour' in your Pavlova and I’m not sure
what texture you’ll end up with, although I daresay you’ll be able to make some
nice corn tortillas.

Incidentally, there is a similar starch ingredient used in Japanese cooking
called 片栗粉 / katakuriko sometimes refered to simply as starch てんぷん / tenpun, but
though it looks and feels similar to corn starch it is made from potato and has
different properties (it's more viscous, does not retain viscosity when cool,
and becomes transparent when used in cooking), it's used in sticky, warm sauces
like ankake and mabo tofu. For baking purposes it's best to hunt down the corn
starch.

Flour

Wheat is 小麦 / komugi in Japanese, and flour is 小麦粉 / komugiko (the 粉
being 'kona' or powder), you'll sometimes also see it written as フラワー / furawaa.

The most common type of flour you'll see is 薄力小麦粉 / hakuriki komugiko, this
means 'weak flour' and is regular all-purpose plain flour suitable for pastry
and cakes. It is possible to make good bread from this flour too, but it is more
difficult than using bread flour because the gluten will not be as strong. Note that Japanese all-purpose flour will generally be weaker (that is, lower in
protein) than flour from the US.

強力小麦粉 / kyouriki (or kyouryoku) komugiko is strong bread
flour, it will often be the one with pictures of bread on the label, and will
have a higher protein content than the regular flour (protein is 蛋白質 /
tanpakushitsu). Again, Japanese bread flour tends to have a lower protein
content than US bread flours - the Nissin brand bread flour is 12% protein,
which is on the low end of the 12-14% scale associated with bread flours. Bread
flour is also sometimes labelled as such パン専用小麦粉 / pan senyou komugiko.

漂白 / hyohaku = bleached

無漂白 / muhyouhaku = unbleached

全粒粉 / zenryuufun = wholewheat flour

有機 / organic

Japanese supermarkets don’t often sell self raising flour (Nissin supermarket does stock Odlums however), and there doesn't appear to be a special
word for it most forums describing it as flour with baking powder in it
ベーキングパウダー入り小麦粉 / beikingu pauda iri komugiko. Fortunately that's exactly how you do it:

Make your own self raising flour (metric grams and U.S. cup versions)

sift together 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and a quarter of a teaspoon of salt per cup of flour in your recipe

which if you prefer is 6 grams of baking powder (about a teaspoon), and 1 gram (a small pinch) of salt for every 100g of flour.

Eggs are 卵 / tamago in Japanese. Although you wouldn’t need any help
identifying the eggs in a supermarket, note that 温泉卵 / onsen tamago are
soft-boiled and not for baking. They are often packaged remarkably similarly to
the raw eggs and right next to them on the shelf. I've seen free range written
as フリーレンジ / furii renji, but it doesn't seem to be as much of a marketing point
in Japan outside the international supermarkets. I have seen powdered egg whites
in small amounts on sale at Tokyu Hands.

Fats

- Butter. Butter is an easy one as it is just written in
katakana as バター however, you might want to know the kanji for unsalted 無塩 / mu
en or 食塩不使用 / shokuen fushiyou, to get the purer form of butter that is best for
baking. Also worthy of note is the huge (sometimes 300%+) difference in price
between some domestic and imported butters. This is partially to do with the
quality, percieved or otherwise, of the imported butter, but also a lot to do
with import taxes.

- Suet = スエット / suetto. (Since this is the same pronunciation as
"sweat" it might be necessary to explain you are looking for the fat from around
the kidneys of a cow (or sheep) - 牛の腎臓についた脂肪 / ushi no jinzou ni tsuita
shibou)

- lard = ラード / ra-do

- shortening = ショートニング / sho-toningu

Of these last 3 fats shortening is the most widely available, you’ll often see
it in a white bucket type container on the shelf with the other baking
ingredients, stable and solid at room temperature. It's often organic,
vegetarian and trans-fat free. I shudder to think what effect this stuff that
keeps for ages at room temperature has on our bodies, and rarely choose to bake
with it, but perhaps I’ll learn more about it and come around to the idea
eventually.

Similarly, lard can be found in a squeezy bottle, resembling kewpie
mayonnaise, often in the oils and sauces section. This is clearly not the same
stuff we used for pastry in the UK when I was little, which came in waxed paper
blocks and had to be kept cold. It is intended for use in savory cooking, to
grease the pan for cha-han and for frying etc, and I don't feel I can recommend
baking with the squeezy bottle room-temperature lard until I’ve experimented
myself.

I have yet to find packets of Atora or similar dry suet, vegetarian or
otherwise in Japan. It makes sense really as suet baking isn’t a part of the
culture. You can find fresh suet in the meat section of many supermarkets
however. Sometimes in little trays near the fresh meat, frequently frozen in
chunks, this fresh suet is used to oil the pan for sukiyaki dishes. I’ve tried
baking with it but need to experiment further, as it is much richer than the dry
stuff used in most recipes, and so amount used in the recipes will need
adjusting down. You may also need to melt it down once and skim any membranes
and froth that become apparent. If you can't find it at your supermarket, try
asking at the butcher shop, even if they don't have any on display.

Food colouring

Check out the cool little spoon that comes with them

Food colouring is 食用色素 / shokuyou shikiso in Japanese. The most common type of food colouring in Japan is in powder form. These
can be added to small amounts of water, or mixed well into a liquid batter. If
you are making a coloured frosting for cupcakes use very little water to avoid
curdling or watering down your frosting and turning it into an unpipable
consistency. If you're making macarons, mix the dry powder in well with the dry ingredients. It’ll be self-evident from the packaging, but here are the basic
colours:

red = 赤 / aka

yellow = 黄色 / kiiro

blue = 青 / ao

green = 緑 / midori

In the same section you can usually find similarly sized bottles of
powdered cream of tartar for whipping egg whites to great volume. Baking
soda/bicarbonate of soda (which you can use to leaven cakes that already contain
acidic ingredients, to boil preztels in, or as an ingredient in your own baking
powder) and baking powder itself.

Sugars

Sugar is 砂糖 / satou in Japanese, and there are many, many varieties available.

In most baking you’ll want a fairly fine sugar, and luckily the large bags
of the cheap 上白糖 / jyouhakutou (sometimes this is just labelled 'white sugar' 白砂糖 / shiro zatou) will do the trick in many cake recipes that call for caster
sugar, but it has not performed well for me in meringues or macarons.
Although this is frequently translated directly as 'caster sugar' it's different. The most important difference is that it is sweeter and less pure, you might want to test using it in a recipe from abroad and experiment with reducing the amount you use. It is also a little grainier than the Silver Spoon/Tate and Lyle stuff from home.

Nissin sells
small packs of imported caster sugar should you need the very fine stuff, and it
is possible to whiz up some of the grittier granulated / グラニュー糖 / guranyu tou sugar in a food processor to make your own finer caster sugar-sized particles. Counter-intuitively, you can find granulated / グラニュー糖 / guranyu tou with caster sugar-sized grains. If you find that (Nissin have 300g packs for 210 yen and you can order from places online), then that is your identical caster sugar, perfect for baking cakes, macaron, etc.

白ざら糖 / shirazaratou is a chunky granulated sugar which is the purest form available and good for professional sponge cake making. Where the 上白糖 is 97.8% pure, グラニュー糖 is 99.5% pure and 白ざら糖
is 100% (more information here in Japanese). There is also a light brown version called 中双糖 / chuzaratou.

Icing sugar = 粉糖 / funtou, and can be found in most supermarkets. It's also
known as confectioners sugar or powdered sugar: パウダーシュガー / pauda shugaa,
アイシングシュガー / aishingu shugaa. Many supermarkets just sell the little 70g bags of
it, but Nissin does a 500g box.

Note that 三温糖 / sanontou, which looks like golden caster sugar, is actually
made from refined white sugar that has then been repeatedly heated and has some
of the molasses returned back to the mixture to create the colour and slight
caramel flavour. Golden caster sugar on the other hand is made with partially
refined sugar meaning it hasn't reached the white stage during processing. You
can experiment using 三温糖 in recipes, many Japanese sites have it listed as an
ingredient in fruit cakes, but it may not behave exactly like golden caster
sugar.

Another light brown Japanese sugar is 和三盆 / wasanbon, this is made in
Shikoku, used in making Japanese sweets 和菓子 / wagashi, and is quite expensive
due to the labour intensive production. There is a lovely write-up of the
history and production of it here. I haven't baked with this sugar yet, but since it is also very sweet it
would probably also require using somewhat less than stated in an international recipe if you were going to experiment using it in place of golden caster sugar, for
example.

For something a little darker (such as when you need demerara
sugar in British recipes) try brown sugar ブラウンシュガー / buraunshugaa, this is a partly refined sugar that retains more of the molasses.

Japan also has a range of distinctively flavoured raw black sugars from
Okinawa and Kagoshima called 黒砂糖 / kurozatou that you can try when a recipe
calls for dark brown or muscovado sugar. Kurozatou includes types that are made
from sugar cane サトウキビ / satoukibi and from sugar beet テンサイ / tenzai.

Cream and milk products

Cream is often labelled fresh cream 生クリーム/ nama kuriimu. If it doesn't specify whether it is single cream シングルクリーム / shinguru kuriimu or double cream ダブルクリーム /daburu kuriimu, you can pick out which is as they are often clearly labelled with the butterfat percentage (乳脂肪 / nyuushibou). Single cream is about 18%-20% butterfat and double cream is upwards of 48%. There are other creams with butterfat percentages of between 35-48% and those are also whippable.
Single cream is best for pouring, and double cream best for whipping. Many of the whipping-suitable creams also come with a little piping bag taped to the carton which is a good hint.

There is a similarly packaged cream-like "whip" ホイップ / howippu substance available that would be ok for putting next to your dessert, but I wouldn’t trust it as an
ingredient for something like ganache or caramel because they often contain
vegetable fats (植物性脂肪 / shokubutsuseishibou) and other additives rather than being pure cream. Sour cream is widely available in little pots, and some international supermarkets stock fromage frais and crème epaisse. I haven’t found crème fraiche, which a lot of quiche recipes call for, but sour cream can be substituted.

Condensed milk = コンデンスミルク / conndensumiruku, or 加糖煉乳 / katourennyu

You’ll often see little red and white tubes of Megmilk Snow brand condensed
milk next to the strawberry display in a Japanese supermarket, though you’d need
a few to make enough for a millionaire’s shortbread recipe, and I’m not entirely
sure if it’s the appropriate consistency. Navigate instead to the tinned goods
aisle, and frequently between the tinned fruits and the tinned tuna (and the mysterious tinned "シーチキン" / sea chicken, which if you are interested turns out to be a tuna+katsuo mix), you will find tins of condensed milk.
Nissin has about 3 brands and they make good cheat's caramel for the above-mentioned
shortbread.

Other ideas

If you’re working from a British recipe, quite often you might be able to
look up an American substitution online and find that more easily in Japan. Such
is the case with treacle, although I’ve found Lyon’s Golden Syrup in Nissin and
other international supermarkets I’ve yet to find their treacle. If your recipe
calls for treacle/black treacle then try using molasses instead which come in
various strengths of flavour. Nissin does the Brer Rabbit brand in mild and full
flavour.

Other times you're stuck, you might be able to make the ingredient yourself – such as with mixed spice or marzipan. Also it's easy to forget that Kappabashi is an option too, where specialist shops such as Flavorland stock many niche ingredients that your local supermarket might not have.

Ordering online whether from within Japan or from abroad is another option,
although you might find that some foodstuffs cannot be easily imported (Lakeland
cannot send their food-grade glycerin to Japan for example. You can get glycerin domestically on Rakuten however ;) ).

Monday, July 16, 2012

I thought I'd do a quick post to celebrate the new look for the 'little shop' blog. I finally got around to fiddling about with the template and now have something that is mine alone, basic though it is. Hope it shows alright on your display!

While in Kappabashi the other day I took the opportunity to have a look at the small commercial ovens currently available in Japan. Although sites such as tenpos.com have listings of second hand equipment including ovens with fantastic discounts, but I'm quite keen to get a new oven if possible as this will be the most important equipment in the shop and I'd like to have warranties, after-sales service and repair coverage if possible, should something go wrong.

Majimaya and Yoshida Kashi Douguten have a few ovens on display at around 300,000 - 500,000 JPY. The 3 models I saw were the Mic Baker, Bake Master and Garnet.

The World Seiki Mic Baker (346,665 JPY) was advertised in a Japanese baking magazine recently, promoted as a multi-purpose small-sized commercial oven. I like that it looks like you can stack them, making it a purchase that could scale with your business, and the simple squat style reminded me a little of the (much larger, brick-fronted) ovens at Levain bakery. Though perhaps Levain's ovens are modified versions of these.

I didn't like that there was no way to put racks in the Mic Baker - you'd be cooking directly on the floor of the oven. I'm thinking they are probably very good for bread, but wonder how they'd handle more delicate cakes and meringues. They are available in gas and electric, and appear to be a well known brand.

At Majimaya there was another model - the Bake Master (298,000 JPY, special price), which has 2 rack settings in place and is somewhat taller than the Mic Baker. However, I couldn't find much information or reviews of it online and I wonder why it had the "cash only" special price..

Staff at Yoshida Kashi Douguten said that the Mic Baker was their best selling small commercial oven for a long time, but that now the European-made Garnet oven is the model they are actively recommending (368,550 JPY). It had 4 positions for racks, a nice big front window and was very pretty. :) I'm afraid I got distracted talking to the staff in the shop and forgot to take a picture (doh!) but here is a picture of the leaflet they gave me.

The Garnet oven is electric, and also comes with or without a steam function (415,800 JPY for the model with steam), which should help with the crusts on the sourdoughs. The other two models looked at here also had either a steam button, or an "OP" option button which could be modified to include steam. A unique selling point of the Garnet is that the convection fan is on the side-wall of the oven rather than the back - when the fan is at the back of the oven and you open the door more of the hot air is lost as the fan blasts it out of the open door, and the idea with the Garnet is supposed to be that you retain more of the heat within the oven. I found a baking-school blog reviewing the Garnet oven (Japanese), and they appear to be quite impressed.

I'll continue my research, and look around to see the kinds of ovens other small bakeries and food businesses are using.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

A series of posts from visiting interesting little (and large) cafes, food-related establishments and other places of inspiration.

Yesterday I spent an all too brief hour or so visiting Kappabashi dougu gai 合羽橋道具街 or 'Kitchen Town' not far from Asakusa, with the express intention of looking at what kind of baking equipment they have. The official site in English is here.

This is the famous street lined with shops for restaurant equipment supplies (the 'dougu' 道具 in the name means 'equipment'), and it does indeed have all the packaging, tins and trays, uniforms, display cases, machinery and pots and pans a restaurant might need. It is of course also a popular destination for tourists looking for the fake food samples / サンプル食品 / sanpuru shokuhinn as interesting souvenirs.

In case you're planning to make a souvenir hunting trip yourself, it's worth knowing that a few of the shops in Kappabashi are closed on Saturdays, and most are closed on Sundays and national holidays - probably because they primarily cater for food business owners.

The closest station is Tawaramachi 田原町 on the Ginza line (Google maps). Come out of exit 3, turn around at the top of the stairs and walk around the corner that's now in front of you, in the opposite direction to the stairs you just came up, and keep going straight. If that sounds confusing have a look at that Google maps link - Kappabashi is the main road about 3 blocks along from the station.

The back of Exit 3, Tawaramachi

It's a short walk to the south end of Kappabashi-dori. First you pass a large temple on your right, set back from the road you're on (first picture below). Walk a bit further and you'll be able to spot the landmark huge chef's head (but of course), in front of you atop the Niimi building - that's the entrance where you turn right onto Kappabashi street and where the main row of shops begins.

Many of the stores will be able to give you a copy of the free Kappabashi "Handy Shop Guide" - they now also have an English one! (The Japanese map is available online.)

It looks like lots of the baking-related shops are on the south end of the street, and there are a couple in particular that stood out.

A small shop crammed full with at least one of every size tin, tray, knife and mould imaginable. They had antique Japanese wooden moulds and a staggering array of piping nozzles:

Here I also found the banneton proofing basket that had so eluded me in France, AND they have dough slashing lame blades, including a Japanese version with a removable blade. They were about 700 - 1000 yen.

The lame / grignette was referred to as a generic 'cook knife' クックナイフ

Banneton proofing basket! / 発酵かご / hakkou kago

I should have known I'd be able to get them in Japan if I kept looking! Japan has a bit of a love affair with 'dougu' - there is proper equipment to kit yourself out with for anything you do for work or leisure. If you've been hiking in Japan you'll have seen fantastically prepared grannies zipping up the slopes with their high-tech walking poles and middle aged men in their North Face Gore-Tex gear with their serious digital cameras, posh camera bags and impressive lenses.

This is another baking specialist shop, with lots of machinery including ovens and kneading machines. They had a small display of counter-top mixers including some extra beater attachments for KitchenAid mixers.

The staff at this shop were very knowledgeable and helpful with questions. They can advise on the comparative merits of big purchases such as ovens and mixers. They had Cuisinart food processors, counter-top KitchenAid and Kenmix mixers, and a couple of larger free-standing Japanese-made Frei mixers. I was told that Yoshida Kashi Douguten is the main sales representative for KitchenAid in Japan and that they are fast helping with repairs when needed, even lending you a machine in to use while yours is being fixed. They also said they can order parts in, such as the blender attachment for the top of the Kenmix.

Those 3 shops are definitely ones to include if you're specifically looking for baking equipment and are short of time, but there is so much to see up and down kappabashi you could easily spend half a day (more!) there.

Here are some of the other delights I spotted in my quick trip:

Cutters for seasonally-appropriate shaped slices of carrot in your soup

'Yaki-in' cast iron brands used to stamp the top of manju buns and wafers etc

Try as I might, I could not find "close" Where DO shops get their grammatically incorrect signs?

Bento packaging, disposable soup bowls.

Kakigori / shaved ice / かき氷 machines and glasses

Basket shop, smelled great, but no banneton here

Almost every size of every item you could need - wooden rice containers

'Flavorland' hundreds of essences and flavourings for drinks and cooking